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Monday, June 16, 2014

You know Piketty is onto something when everyone’s trying to prove him wrong

I'm with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the response to Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

But
what troubles me most about the FT’s [Financial Times] approach to its Piketty critique
is not that the paper raked through the data sets. That’s fair enough.
It’s the implicit assertion—assuming Picketty is wrong and inequality
is marginally less severe today than it was during the Industrial
Revolution—that beating a 200-year-old standard of inequality is a major
accomplishment that we should feel good about.

During the last several weeks, Thomas Piketty’s magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century has
earned great protestation on the heels of great praise. As the hits
keep coming, I am reminded of the experience of another courageous,
insightful truth-teller: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work the Rockefeller
Foundation supported when I served there for much of the 2000s.

Many
will remember that Pachauri and the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace
Prize with former US vice president Al Gore. Earlier that year, the
panel’s so-called Fourth Assessment Report was the very first to
demonstrate “unequivocally,” in its phrasing, that human activity is
warming our world with worsening consequences.

And
yet, by 2010 a number of pundits had taken to the talk shows and
opinion pages—from the Financial Times to the New York Times—calling for his resignation.

What was Pachauri’s impeachable offense? After countless false recriminations and abundant sound and fury, there were two quibbles of merit.
Among the more than 18,000 references cited in the IPCC’s 2,800-page
assessment, one overestimated the speed at which Himalayan glaciers are
melting (for which the IPCC later apologized) and another included a typo in the percentage of the Netherlands that lies beneath sea level.
From there, the “climate-gate” juggernaut had all the fuel it needed to
drive lingering doubt about climate change into our political
consciousness and public conversation.

It’s
understood that translating data into meaningful insights requires a
number of interpretative decisions, to say nothing of rigorous peer
review. No one pretends that these interpretive choices of data handling
are without some subjectivity. What matters with data-driven
scholarship like Pachauri’s and now Piketty’s is how transparent the
scholar’s choices are, and how fair and defensible the resulting
conclusions.

This
is why it is worth nothing that when Piketty responded directly to
criticisms in the Financial Times a few weeks ago, he expressed openness
about his choices, honesty about the certainties and shortcomings of
his conclusions, and fidelity to a full and free exchange of ideas. In
this regard, Pachauri and Piketty are scholarly kindred spirits.

What
worries me is not the existence of debate about Pachauri’s or Piketty’s
research. What worries me is the willful insistence that something must
be wrong with the data because critics don’t like the conclusions of
the researcher.

In other words, what worries me is an intense feeling of déjà vu all over again.

For
years, climate-change deniers—many of them supported by powerful
interests—ginned up false controversy in order to erode the credibility
of climatology. Following the tobacco industry’s tried and true tactics
of the 1970s, a climate-crisis-denial industrial complex sowed
skepticism to distract from, and ultimately derail, important
conversations about solutions.

As
a result, we have lost years of opportunity. We are a decade nearer to
environmental and human catastrophe, but hardly any closer to a response
befitting the scale of the crisis.

I
would like to think that a similar pattern of discrediting and delay
could not unfold again. I would like to think that our lived experience
with widening disparity—reinforced by clear and compelling data—will
keep inequality-denial at bay.

But
what troubles me most about the FT’s approach to its Piketty critique
is not that the paper raked through the data sets. That’s fair enough.
It’s the implicit assertion—assuming Picketty is wrong and inequality
is marginally less severe today than it was during the Industrial
Revolution—that beating a 200-year-old standard of inequality is a major
accomplishment that we should feel good about.

As
president of a foundation dedicated to advancing fairness, opportunity
and rights, I am regularly disheartened by the ingenious and insidious
methods by which the well-being and aspirations of ordinary people are
undermined by those with power. Far from being persuaded by the
arguments of inequality deniers, the message I take away is that we
remain tragically far from where we should be in fulfilling the
universal human yearning for justice and dignity.

Given
that inequality and climate change are two of the most significant
challenges to humanity in this century, it is critical we see the
debates surrounding them for what they truly are: enormous struggles
over power and possibility. It is up to of us to snap out of the déjà
vu, recognize we have been here before, and change course.